2012 MacBook Pro 15-inch

Both are the most compelling laptops for photographs and videographers ever produced by Apple. Following on the heels of Apple’s already-excellent quad-core 2011 Macbook Pro, they make further improvement with slightly faster CPUs and the very useful USB3 ports for fast external drives, a key feature for backup and storage expansion.

Price and features

The standard model appears to cost $700 less than the Retina model, but the actual price is more or less the same when configured similarly.

Two Thunderbolt ports (1 in the non-Retina model), but the FW800 and ethernet adapters eat up one or both of these ports unless an external expansion box is used.

Firewire 800 and ethernet require external adapters via Thunderbolt.

Two USB3 ports, one on the right hand side.

1.1 pounds lower weight.

On the other hand, the conventional 15" non-Retina MacBook Pro offers:

Choice of hard drive or SSD in a wide variety of capacities, upgradeable with standard 2.5" hard drives or SSDs.

One or two internal hard drives or SSDs (2nd one requires removal of the optical drive). Thus, RAID-0 striping or RAID-1 mirroring are possible internally, or an internal backup drive, etc.

Built-in Firewire 800 and gigabit Ethernet.

Anti-glare screen option.

Upgradeable memory to 16GB.

The screen on the Retina model is appealing, but the dual-drive capability and built-in FW800 and ethernet are attractive for some field uses. That said, my choice for my own use is definitely the Retina model— I love the screen quality.